


A Mystery to be Uncovered

by beeeinyourbonnet



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-14
Updated: 2014-02-12
Packaged: 2017-12-29 09:15:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1003651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beeeinyourbonnet/pseuds/beeeinyourbonnet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. Gold, town therapist, finds himself reluctantly intrigued when the Nolans enlist his help in investigating the secret psychiatric ward under the hospital.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> These chapters will prob just be super short scenes. I am v sorry >_>

Dr. Gold sat in his leather armchair, sipping brandy out of his coffee mug while he waited for David Nolan and his ex-harlot wife to arrive. They were straddling the line between being his least favorite clients and his most favorite. On one hand, they were always laughably easy to cure, and he had been seeing them for so long that he almost felt a slight kinship with the two of them—but on the other hand, they were unnaturally co-dependent on him. Their weekly sessions had turned biweekly, and now he was lucky if they only made two emergency appointments a week in addition.

Today was an emergency appointment. He prayed it wasn’t about the windmill in the garden again.

The door opened as he was tipping the last of his brandy back, and he forced a bland smile. He should refill his mug from the pot on the filing cabinet, but moving sounded like too much trouble, and he would need all of his energy not to offend his best paying clients.

“Mr. Gold,” Mary Margaret said, waving off his hello with a purple-mittened hand. “We have a big problem.”

“Do share.” He leaned back in his chair, resting his left ankle atop his right knee and using his leg as a table for his clipboard. Maybe if he stole the windmill and burned it, their emergency sessions would end.

“We found something.” David plopped down next to Mary Margaret on the couch, arm around his wife, and stared at Gold.

“Oh?”

“Yes, and  we weren’t sure who to tell other than you.” Mary Margaret rubbed at her arm until David gentled her fingers into his.

This was not the way their sessions usually went. It went unspoken that Gold knew every single intimate detail of their lives, in particular the ones he never cared to know.

“What is it?”

They exchanged looks, and then Mary Margaret pressed her lips together and patted David on the hand.

“We have reason to believe that there’s a secret psychiatric ward under the hospital,” David said.

Had Gold been drinking anything, he would have choked on it. This town was weird, that was for sure, but a secret psychiatric ward? He would have known about that. He knew all the town’s secrets.

“What’s this really about?” he asked, jotting down _more brandy_ on his clipboard.

“We’re serious!” Mary Margaret looked up. “We found some—some evidence. We can show you! Just come with us.”

Leaving his office was the least appealing notion he’d had all day, but he had never seen Mary Margaret this spooked—not even when she and David had failed their wedding night from too much champagne and not enough manpower.

“I have an appointment after you.” The Mayor did not like to be kept waiting—so naturally, he preferred to keep the Nolans as long as possible.

“Tonight, then. After work hours.” They exchanged looks again. “When Mayor Mills is home.”

Going against Regina did stack more points in favor of this plan, as did the intrigue of finding a possible secret area. Still—“What do I get in return for going with you?”

David and Mary Margaret looked at each other, and seemed to be having some sort of conversation with narrowed eyes and creased brows. Then, they both turned to him.

“We’ll keep your secret.”

Gold blinked, then let out a laugh that was more expelled air than anything. “If you know any of my secrets, I’ll be very surprised.”

Mary Margaret let her gaze drift toward his coffee cup, then tilted her head. There were still a few drops of brandy in the bottom. He sighed—the mayor didn’t need any new reasons to try and take his job away.

“Very well. Meet me at the hospital at midnight.”


	2. Chapter 2

Henry Mills still hadn’t discovered who Gold was in his book, and Gold was perfectly content with that. He was a crippled old man—not some prince or knight or hero. If anything, he would have been the beast, or the witch from _Snow White_ once she turned old and gnarled and ugly.

“Unless you’re the troll on the bridge that Snow turned into a cockroach,” Henry mused, lips scrunched. Gold chuckled, sipping at coffee. This was how all of their sessions went.

“Perhaps I’m just not in it.” Or perhaps he _was_ a troll.

Henry flipped through the book, almost the same size as his lap, and shook his head. “No, no, you have to be someone important to my mom. Maybe—maybe you’re Snow White’s dad?”

He wrinkled his nose, barely keeping the shudder from the rest of his body. If Henry’s theory was correct, then Snow White was Mary Margaret, and he did not want to be Mary Margaret’s father. He barely wanted to be her therapist.

“I’d rather not have been married to your mother in a past life.”

Henry snickered a little at that, but was soon back to a look far too serious for a ten year old. He was determined to discover all the town’s secrets, even ones he had to make up.

“Henry,” Gold said, struck with an idea.

“Hm?”

“Does your book talk about any secret basements? Or hideouts of any kind?”

Gold felt silly coming to a child for advice, but no one would have taken his question more seriously. Henry spent a full minute thinking about it, then flipped through the pages until he could show him an underground cave.

“The wolves had a hide out, if that’s what you mean. That’s where Red was, when she learned to control her wolf powers.”

“Eh.” Wolf-powers didn’t sound like it would translate to a secret psychiatric ward—although, anything was possible if one was assuming that one’s life was a cursed fairy tale. “How about a secret room under a medical facility?”

Henry gave him a look as though he had just suggested he try flying. “Dr. Gold, this is the Enchanted Forest. They had magic, not medical facilities.”

“Oh, of course.” He leaned back in his chair, using all of his effort not to roll his eyes. “All right, do you know anything about a secret room under Storybrooke General?”

Henry’s eyes widened, and Gold took a small amount of perverse pleasure in having surprised him. “A secret room? Really? What’s it for? Where is it? Is it just right under? Who knows about it?”

“Calm yourself. I don’t even know that it’s real.” He considered his next words for about half a second before continuing with, “But I’m going tonight with Mary Margaret and David, if you’d like to come along. I can pick you up on your street around 11:30.”

Henry’s face lit up like Gold had never seen it do before. If Regina ever found out, she would rip his heart out and run it over with a car.


	3. Chapter 3

Gold had parked just out of sight of the mayor’s house, and Henry met him there at 11:30 on the dot. He had a backpack with him, and as Gold drove, he pulled out all the items in his pack—the book, a flashlight, a baseball bat in case of danger, a bag of chips in case of hunger, and a stink bomb in case they needed a distraction.

“What’s the plan?” he asked, sitting in the center of the backseat so that he could pop his head next to Gold.

“We bribe the night security guard,” he said, trying not to show his amusement at Henry’s planning of the crime. He didn’t need an offended ten year old on his hands.

“That’s stupid. I thought we were breaking in?”

“We don’t want to trip any alarms. It’s better to have people who can disable them.”

“You can’t disable an alarm?”

Of course he could disable an alarm. He met Henry’s gaze in the rearview mirror, and he knew they both knew this.

“We’ll see what happens.”

* * *

Mary Margaret and David were both wearing black jeans and turtlenecks, and Mary Margaret’s knit beret made them look like they were wearing a couples’ beatnik costume. Gold tried to exchange a disdainful look with Henry, but the boy was already bounding over.

“Hi, Miss Blanchard—I mean, Mrs. Nolan. David.”

“Hey, Henry,” David said, ruffling his hair. Mary Margaret, on the other hand, was staring at Gold as though he’d just betrayed her.

“What were you thinking?” she hissed. “Not only is it too late for a ten year old boy to be out and about, but we are about to commit a crime, and he is the mayor’s son!”

“It’s okay, I’m here to help!” Henry said.

Mary Margaret gave Gold one last poisonous look before turning a forced smile to Henry. “Honey, I know you want to help, but—”

“But he could prove to be invaluable.” Gold rested a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “We don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into. Henry knows everything about this town.”

Henry beamed up at Mary Margaret who, after looking between the two of them for a full half minute, sighed.

“Fine. Let’s just go.”

“Are we bribing the guards or disabling the alarms?” Henry asked, bounding along after them.

“Neither,” Mary Margaret said. “We’re just going to explain to them that we need to get into the basement because we think that there’s some illegal activity going on down there.”

Gold, David, and Henry all laughed. Mary Margaret turned to glare at her husband, so he quieted first, but it was Gold who stopped long enough to speak.

“That’s not going to work. Either they’ll know about it and claim not to, or they’ll call the police because we’re crazy. We have to go in without saying anything.”

“Well, then bribing the guards won’t work, will it?” Mary Margaret snapped. “We’ll just have to break in.”

“Mr. Gold can disable the alarms!” Henry said.

“Can you?” David asked.

“Of course I can.”

It didn’t take long at all to get inside, and a quick check of the security room found Leroy asleep enough that Mary Margaret could sneak in and disable the cameras once Gold told her how. Then, it was down to the basement, where they were confronted with a keypad and a door marked ‘EXIT.’

“If this is not a secret ward, I am going to be very disappointed,” Gold growled. He didn’t know when the words had become true, but he could no longer ignore the adventure-lust running through his veins.

“Won’t we all,” David whispered, glancing down at Henry, who was clutching his book to his chest with his mouth gaping wide. “Can you figure out the alarm code?”

“Don’t insult me,” Gold said, squinting forward at the keys. After a few seconds, he found a magnifying glass being shoved into his hands, and a circle of light appeared on the keypad. He glanced down at Henry, holding a flashlight and grinning.

“I came prepared.”

“So you did.”

The magnifying glass helped, and Gold was confident that he now knew what the code was. As he raised his finger to type it in, Mary Margaret put a hand on his arm to stop him.

“What?” He turned, giving her a withering look.

“What if there’s a guard?”

All four of them turned back to the door and stared. None of them had considered the secret wing having anyone in it.

“David, go get a lab coat,” Gold said after a few minutes. “There has to be one. We’ll call you a new doctor, and you can distract the guard while we sneak by.”

“What if it’s someone who’s good at their job?” Henry asked.

“I doubt that will happen,” Gold said, shaking his head. “David, go.”

David nodded, and he and Mary Margaret slipped away to find the disguise, leaving Gold with a ten year old boy who was so excited, he was almost vibrating.

“Do you think we’ll find anything?” he whispered, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“I hope so.”


	4. Chapter 4

When the Nolans arrived, David was in a coat with a stethoscope and Mary Margaret was waving a scrap of paper.

“What’s that?” Gold asked, frowning.

“We snuck back into the security office and found the pass code,” she said. “Leroy was passed out drunk, he never even heard the door.”

“How reckless of you.” Gold snatched the paper from her and studied the code. He’d had all four digits correct, but he’d had the last two switched.

“Okay. We’ll send David in first. Can you be quiet with your cane?” Mary Margaret asked, face flushed.

“Of course. Ready?”

Without waiting for an answer, Gold punched in the code. There was a small buzzing noise as the electronic lock was released, and then the door was theirs to open. They all stared at the door, and even Henry was silent. Then, after a look at David, they all stepped aside.

He straightened up, looking pale behind his confident swagger, and pushed the door open. They all waited just out of sight of anyone in the room until David poked his head back out.

“Guys, you have to see this. Come on. It’s empty, and it’s definitely not an exit.”

With his blood thrilling in his veins, Gold stepped through the doorway. It looked like storage—dark and with visible pipes—but there was an empty desk with a name plate on it. What would they need a circulation desk in a storage closet for?

“Oh my god,” Henry whispered, clutching at his book.

A deep unease had settled in Gold’s chest, and his skin prickled. The corridor beyond the makeshift lobby was dark, and he felt like he would be face-to-face with a dragon or a demon if he stepped into it, so he maneuvered until Henry was behind him. “Be careful.”

“Is there a light anywhere?” David asked, looking around.

“Here!” Henry stepped around Gold to offer his flashlight. David took it, switching it on, and the corridor swallowed the light.

“What do you think is down there?” Mary Margaret whispered, hands up like she was prepared to get into a fist fight.

“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.” Taking a deep breath to push down his cowardice, Gold stepped past David, following the small circle of light.

They all followed, stepping slowly down the concrete hallway. It wasn’t long, and it was filled with unmarked doors, like some otherworldly nightmare. Gold felt like he might meet his judgment were he to open one, and he shied away from them, telling himself that he was just keeping Henry safely in the middle.

All of them made squeaky noises when the hallway was suddenly flooded with light, but when they turned, it was just Henry standing by a switch.

“Found the lights,” he said, grinning.

Gold’s heart wouldn’t calm down though, and he clutched at the handle of his cane.

“Look!” David raced to the nearest door, pointing to what looked like a mail slot at eyelevel. “They’ve got windows.” He opened it and looked inside. “This one’s empty, but they can’t all be. We should check.”

There were only about eight doors, so they split up to look. Henry was too short to see inside, so he tagged along with Gold.

“These are all empty,” David said, sliding closed his third slot.

“Mine, too,” Mary Margaret agreed.

Gold grunted, limping toward his second door with his growing sense of dread. If there was nothing down here, then it was only because someone had found out they were coming and removed it. Leaning on his cane, he flipped open the door while everyone watched with wide eyes.

“Empty,” he said, and he was about to close the slot again when a movement caught his eye, and then he choked on his breath and stumbled back because something had just locked eyes with him.

David and Mary Margaret were at his side in seconds. “What? What is it?” David asked, trying to move around him to see, but Gold was still in the way, staring at the door like it had just burst into flames.

“Find a key,” he wheezed, taking a step closer to the door again. “There’s someone in there.”


	5. Chapter 5

The search for the key did not go well. Every few minutes, one of the Nolans would shout something encouraging, like “hang in there!” or “we’re going to rescue you!” but these were hollow promises.  Gold almost didn’t want to find the key, wanted to keep whatever was locked up locked up, because his gut was telling him to be terrified of whoever lay behind that door.

“Wait,” Mary Margaret said, and they all turned to look at her. “What if whoever’s locked up there is locked up for a reason?”

“Doubtful,” Gold said, going back to digging through the desk drawers. “It wouldn’t be so secret if it was justified.”

“Yeah, and besides, the Evil Queen kept lots of prisoners,” Henry said. Gold grunted his assent, and the Nolans both turned to look at him with disapprovingly furrowed eyebrows.

“I doubt the mayor would lock someone up unjustly,” Mary Margaret said, emphasizing ‘the mayor.’

“Whatever you say.” Henry shook his head.

“Guys, I think I found something!”

Everyone turned to look at David, who thrust a belt of keys into the air.

“Wonderful. We’ve got a one in fifty chance of those being the right one,” Gold said. Nonetheless, he shut the desk drawer and limped over.

“All right, let’s start trying them all.” He plucked a brass key off the ring and headed for the door like he was brandishing a sword.

“Wait a minute,” Gold said, limping after him as fast as his ankle would allow. “The lock is silver. The key is going to be silver.”

David looked down at his hand, then flipped a few keys until he found a silver one. “There. Hey, if you can hear me—we’re about to get you out!”

Gold rolled his eyes, but clutched his cane tighter anyway. He was not at all ready to face whatever was inside that cell. His instincts were screaming that this couldn’t turn out well for him—and his instincts had never been wrong before.

David tried six keys before there was the clicking sound of a lock being undone, and Gold could taste the silence. He pushed David aside when he tried to open the door, swallowing at the look the younger man gave him.

“Let me,” he whispered. This was his destiny—he could feel it. He didn’t know how he could feel it, but he just knew that it was like he was made of magnets. Henry standing at his elbow with his book clutched to his chest only cemented this feeling.

He tugged the door open, prepared for the worst, and was instead confronted by a wispy girl in a hospital gown, clutching at her knees and staring up at them all with wide, terrified eyes. Her lips were the same pasty color as the rest of her face, and her hair was so dull, it was almost grey, but her eyes were the brightest blue he’d ever seen.

“Hey,” he said before one of the Nolans—he should start referring to them as the Charmings, like Henry did—could speak.

The woman didn’t move, didn’t open her mouth, just stared at him. What was he supposed to do?

“We’re here to save you,” he tried, but the fear in her eyes was making his throat dry, and he wanted to cower backwards and let the Charmings handle this.

Instead, Henry wiggled his way through the doorway and sat next to the woman on her dirty concrete bench. “Hi! I’m Henry. We’re rescuing you.”

She looked down at him, and some of the fear left her eyes. “Hello,” she whispered, and her voice was like a wrench that had been left out to rust.

“What’s your name?” Henry asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

She shook her head, and if Gold hadn’t been too entranced to look away before, he certainly was when her eyes darted over to him.

“Come with us.” Henry stood up, offering her his hand. “We’re busting you out.”

The woman stared for a second before removing her hand from her knees and grasping Henry’s. Then, he was helping her up, and David pulled Gold aside so that they could leave the cell.

“Where should we go now?” Henry asked, struggling to hold his giant book and the woman’s hand.

Gold swallowed the sawdust settling in his throat. “My office. We’ll figure this all out there.”


	6. Chapter 6

 The woman rode in the back of Gold’s car with Henry, clinging to his hand the entire time, with heat on full blast since the woman had nothing against the cold but her hospital gown. Gold could hear the pages of Henry’s book turning, and every time he glanced in his rearview, he could see them both poring over it.

“You have to be one of the Queen’s enemies,” Henry said, sounding for all the world like he was trying to puzzle out calculus.

“Who?” the woman asked. All of her attention was on the book, fingers inching ever closer to the pages like she was trying to sneak up on them.

“The Evil Queen. She cast a curse that brought everyone in the Enchanted Forest to Storybrooke and took away their happy endings.”

“Oh.” She ran a finger along the page, and paused on something Gold couldn’t make out. “Who’s that?”

“That’s the Queen. She’s my mom. She hates Snow White—that’s Mary Margaret—because she’s jealous of her, so she wants to make sure she’s never happy with Charming.”

“You really think that someone would curse an entire land out of jealousy?” Gold asked.

“Mr. Gold,” Henry said, and he could almost hear him folding his arms. “You’ve read all the stories. You know what happens.”

“Yes, Mr. Gold, do keep up,” the woman said in her scratchy voice. He met her eyes in the rearview, and she was pressing her lips together like she was trying to keep from laughing, though she was still hunched into the back of the seat like she wanted to disappear inside it.

“My apologies.”

The office was close, and they made it before the Charmings. Gold parked, but didn’t turn the car off. The woman in his backseat was huddled up, arms squeezing herself together. With the book clutched against Henry’s chest, she had nowhere to look, and so she just looked out the window at the building like a lost fawn.

Without thinking about why he was doing it, Gold shrugged out of his designer suit jacket. “Here,” he said, handing it back to the woman, who was probably caked over with dirt and dust and grime. It should have bothered him that a stranger was going to be using—possibly ruining—something of his without giving him anything in return, but he could not summon up any ire. Something about the way her pasty arm reached for it, bright eyes watching his, made him feel like something was shifting inside his chest, recognizing that it needed to move aside to make room for something else.

No good could come from a feeling like that.  


	7. Chapter 7

Once in the office, the woman did not return his blazer, and he did not ask her to. She sat on the couch next to Henry, and the Charmings managed to deduce that they should sit elsewhere, so they took over his chair, leaving only the edge of the couch for him.

He made the woman tea in a Styrofoam cup, tipping in a spoonful of brandy to warm her up and a spoonful of honey to sweeten it. From one of his drawers, he unearthed a box of shortbread cookies, and then set both offerings in front of her. She was skin and bone, and someone would have to feed her something substantial soon, but while they figured everything out, the cookies would have to do.

“Here,” he said, avoiding her eyes. Her chilly hand brushed his as she accepted the cup, and he backed away like a spooked rabbit, curling himself into the opposite end of the couch.

“Thank you.” She wrapped both hands around it before taking a sip.

“Okay, so I have it narrowed down,” Henry said, flipping his book open to half rest in the woman’s lap.

“Narrowed down to what?” Mary Margaret asked. She was perched on the arm of Gold’s chair, hand clasped around David’s.

“She has to be one of the people that the Queen didn’t like, but you’re Snow White, so she can’t be her, even if she is really pretty.”

Gold didn’t look at Mary Margaret, knowing that she would be giving him her disapproving-teacher look. Instead, he watched the woman. Her fingers tapped against the cup, and a tiny smile was playing around the corners of her mouth. Henry looked like he hadn’t even noticed that he’d called the woman next to him pretty.

“Who are the choices?” Gold asked, crossing one leg over the other and leaning into his corner of the couch.

“Mr. Gold,” Mary Margaret hissed.

He looked up at her, one eyebrow lifted. “Yes, dear?”

“Can I—can _we_ speak with you in the hallway?”

“No. Henry, who are the choices?”

He and Henry shared a small smile, and then he looked back down at his book and started flipping through. “Well, I think the obvious choice is Belle, since the Queen locked her up, and she has long brown hair and blue eyes, but that doesn’t mean that she’s the only princess that was locked up.”

“Belle would be as pretty as Snow White, I’d imagine,” Gold said, ignoring the sound of Mary Margaret’s heels hitting the chair over and over.

“Exactly. But she could also be Sleeping Beauty. I mean, she was under the Sleeping Curse, so the Queen could have put her under the hospital because she thought she’d just be asleep all the time.”

“But she’s not asleep,” Gold murmured. “What about Cinderella? She was locked in a tower, wasn’t she? Or at the very least, oppressed.”

Henry shook his head. “Nah, Cinderella is Ashley Boyd. Rumpelstiltskin cursed her and Prince Thomas to be apart until she came through with their deal and gave him her baby.”

Gold swallowed, teeth clenched. In a safe behind a painting in his office, there was a contract dictating that Ashley Boyd’s newborn would be entrusted to him, so that he might find it a better home.

“Are you sure you don’t remember anything?” Mary Margaret asked, taking his brief silence as an opening.

The woman shied closer to Henry, and Mary Margaret pressed her lips together like she was fending off heartbreak. Unlike Gold, she wasn’t used to being feared.

“Just the nurse, and a woman who sometimes looks through the window.”

They all swiveled to face her, and she tried to sink into the couch cushions, wiggling as though the crack between them might spread and swallow her if she tried hard enough.

“What woman?” Gold asked.

“I don’t know. She never speaks, or opens the door.”

“What does she look like?” David asked, leaning forward in his chair. Mary Margaret had her lips pressed together, like she was just daring them all to suggest one more time that the Mayor had locked this woman up.

“Her eyes are brown.” The woman swallowed. “And there’s a lot of black smudges around them.”

Gold clenched his teeth, throat burning. “Anything else?”

“That could describe anyone,” Mary Margaret said. “There could be another nurse, or a doctor. For all we know, this woman might have been locked up for—”

“Mary Margaret, I think we all know she wasn’t locked up for good reason,” David said, taking her hand in both of his. He looked over at the woman, giving her a gentle shepherd’s smile. “Go on. Was there anything else?”

“She—um.” The woman swallowed, squinting like she was trying to see something. “She had dark lips. And dark hair. And she smiled.”

“It could be anyone,” Mary Margaret said, though she was chewing her lip now.

“If you saw a picture,” Gold said, leaning toward her. “Could you identify her?”

The woman met his eyes, watching him for a few seconds, and then nodded. “I think so.”

“Do you have a picture of Regina on hand?” Mary Margaret asked, folding her arms.

“As a matter of fact,” Gold said, starting to stand up. “I do.” In his filing cabinet, he had pictures of almost all of his patients.

“Do you remember anything from before you were locked up?” Henry asked. “Or anything you did while you were locked up?”

“Um.” She was quiet, mouth twisted in thought. Gold limped back over to the couch with Regina’s file, which was more a list of observations and information than a catalogue of her psychiatric treatment.

He sat, watching the woman press patterns into her emptying cup. She hadn’t touched the cookies yet, but the tea was almost gone.

“Tally marks,” she said after a full minute. “I used to make tally marks on the wall. To count the days.”

Gold looked over at David, whose furrowed brow mimicked his own. “There were no tally marks on the wall, were there?”

David shook his head. “Not that I remember. Someone must have come in and sanded them off or something.”

Henry, though, looked ready to burst, and started flipping through pages like they were on fire. No one could speak, not even Mary Margaret, until he stopped on a page with a woman in a cell and a blue dress. “Look!”

Gold and the woman both leaned over to see the picture better. The woman in the painting had long brown hair and blue eyes, and was sitting in a cell with hundreds of tally marks on the stone wall.

“So that’s me, then?” the woman asked, seeming to be the only adult in the room who could still breathe. Even Mary Margaret was wide-eyed.

“Do you recognize this woman?” Gold’s voice was like water through a rusty pipe, so he cleared his throat while he laid the picture of Regina on top of the painting.

The woman spared half a glance, then looked up and met Gold’s eyes, nodding. “Yes. That’s her. I would recognize her anywhere.”

“That makes a lot of sense,” Henry said, flipping a few more pages. “The Queen locked Belle up because Rumpelstiltskin loved her, and kept her in a—”

“All right!” Mary Margaret stood, tugging on David’s hand until he followed her. “Mr. Gold, it is almost two in the morning, and it’s time for Henry to go home. Tonight is a school night. We’ll take Jane Doe with us, and figure everything out in the morning.”

“Absolutely not.” Gold stood up, voice stronger now despite the fact that he felt like his lungs were collapsing. Rumpelstiltskin was the beast, too. “She is not going with you.”

The woman either whispered something or coughed, and no one took notice but Henry, who reached for her tiny hand again.

“Well, where do you want her to go, then? Back to the hospital? Here? We can’t just lock her up, even if it’s not in a cell.”

“She’ll come with me,” Gold said, unsure of where his conviction was coming from. He wouldn’t let anyone take her away.

This time, they heard her voice, but no one could make it out, so they looked back at each other.

“I don’t trust you,” Mary Margaret said, clenching her fists like she was bracing herself so she wouldn’t wilt away.

“Not my problem.”

“Guys!”

They all stopped long enough to look at Henry, who was glaring at them now. The woman—Gold would not call her Jane Doe, no matter what Mary Margaret said—was squeezing his hand and staring at her knees.

“Yes, Henry?” Gold asked.

“She’s trying to say something, but none of you are listening.” Henry looked at the woman. “Go ahead.”

“My name is Belle,” she said, looking up at them. “Not Jane Doe. I want to be Belle.”

Mary Margaret blinked, then looked at Gold like he was their therapist again, set to fix all of their problems. “Of course. Sorry. We’ll call you Belle. Who do you want to go with?”

Belle looked between the two of them, eyes darting around like a kitten trying to find an escape. “Can’t I go with Henry?”

Mary Margaret shook her head. “No, Regina is his mother. If—if she locked you up, it’s a bad idea to let her know you’re out.”

Belle looked down at her arm, tugging the sleeve of Gold’s jacket down to scrunch between her fingers. “I’d like to go with you, I think, Mr. Gold.”

“We’ll take Henry home, then,” Mary Margaret said, holding her hand out.

“No.” Gold shook his head. “If Regina sees your car, and finds out Henry was with you, you’ll have more trouble than you can afford, and I do not intend to offer you my legal services as well as my therapeutic. I’ll take him.”

Mary Margaret looked near tears, but nodded, David’s hand almost white in her iron grip. “Okay. We’ll see you tomorrow, then. For our appointment.”

“Yes. Goodnight.”

He offered his arm to Belle, who was holding tight to Henry’s hand again. She wrapped her fingers around his elbow, and then the three of them set out for the car like some strange, lopsided family.


End file.
